THAT BEARD STAYED, AND SO DID HEADLEY

“The same thing happened in New York. Someone started a rumor about me that turned out to be true.”

The quote has lived on for decades, attributed not to a baseball player, but to a sometimes perplexing ABA/NBA star who had the man-child body and skills of LeBron James and the logic of Yogi Berra. Spencer Haywood’s line comes to mind — and often rings true — every time Major League Baseball goes all apoplectic at trading-deadline time.

Thank goodness that — summer’s silly season — is over. Run amok again was the annual rumor race to the end of July, the two or three weeks of fabrication, fed by gossip, fueled by speculation, marinated in guesswork, tweeted beyond all recognition and reason.

And just how is Chase Headley doing with the Yankees? Or did he go to the O’s?

No?

None of this is to suggest that Headley wasn’t indeed the “best position player on the market,” as he was assessed by ESPN. Nor is it a claim that the Padres never got close to actually trading away the switch-hitting third baseman who’d almost certainly become an All-Star with most any other club. (My own contribution, anyway, to the realm of sheer conjecture.)

“Dealing with that is part of the job we do, and in some ways, that felt good,” said Josh Byrnes, the Padres’ executive vice president and general manager. “Chase is a really good player. His numbers get knocked down by Petco and we haven’t played on national TV a whole lot. So that was sort of a good thing, for Chase to be widely recognized as a really good player.”

That he wasn’t dealt at the deadline spared the Padres from the sort of scene that went on at Wrigley Field on Monday night. First, outfielder Reed Johnson was pulled from the game by the Chicago Cubs, commencing to hug out his farewells in the dugout with now ex-teammates. He and pitcher Paul Maholm had been traded to Atlanta.

Only a matter of minutes later, catcher Geovany Soto was a sudden scratch, giving out handshakes and possibly receiving congratulations for being sent from one of baseball’s worst teams to a two-time defending American League champion. Soto soon was to be joined with the Texas Rangers by Chicago battery-mate Ryan Dempster.

Byrnes remembered seeing Colorado Rockies ace Ubaldo Jimenez take the mound at Petco Park on July 30 of last year, everyone knowing full well that Jimenez was a dotted “i” from being an Indian. The surprise wasn’t that Jimenez indeed was yanked from the game, but that Cleveland didn’t hit the eject button as Jimenez was in the process of walking four Padres and giving up four runs in that one inning of work.

“From a manager’s standpoint, you want to play it above board and play guys,” said A.J. Hinch, a Padres vice president and assistant GM. “But then you know guys are in the rumor mill as being traded and all of a sudden they’re sick that day. Now it’s the minors.